Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World Highlight

The corporate press (a repentant Hearst in particular) became increasingly hysterical, trying its best to marginalize the Reds as enemies of America and its people. But the press was a relatively weak tool, as Hoover found out during the run-up to the stock-market crash. What the ruling class needed to do was the same thing its enemies in the working class were doing: organize. “The radicals almost, almost took over,” recalled Bill Camp. “That caused the Associated Farmers to [come to] be.”49 With a name that evokes both Stanford’s Associates and Hoover’s associative state, the Associated Farmers of California (AFC) was a standing committee of California capitalists that existed to coordinate extralegal anticommunist activities in the agriculture industry and beyond.